Has any other person cost the U.S. more money than bin Laden?

The Washington Post's Ezra Klein says the price tag easily runs into the trillions of dollars:

The Afghanistan and Iraq wars, neither of which would've been launched without bin Laden's provocation, will cost us a few trillion on their own, actually. But before such reprisals were even on the table, there was the [9/11] attack itself, which largely shut down the American economy for a matter of days, and then slowed it for weeks. There was a long period in which Americans avoided the airlines, which pushed them so close to bankruptcy that Congress passed a $15 billion federal bailout, but the costs of that intervention pale in comparison to the price of the endless security theater Americans undergo each time they need to fly, which some experts peg at $8 billion a year -- and there's a good argument that they're being conservative.

Klein argues that only Hitler comes close in terms of monetary cost (human cost is something else altogether).


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Mark Lacter
Mark Lacter created the LA Biz Observed blog in 2006. He posted until the day before his death on Nov. 13, 2013.
 
Mark Lacter, business writer and editor was 59
The multi-talented Mark Lacter
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